An average current account holder in the UK was charged £152 as bank fees last year, an analysis of more than 11,000 personal current accounts (PCA) has found.

The amount, if incurred by every one of the 65 million active current accounts in the UK, will make up to nearly £9.9bn.

The data was revealed by Plum, an automated money management chatbot at the launch of its Fee Fighters function.

The new function, implemented as a result of open banking system, is a free tool that will enable the users to identify and check the fees they are charged by their banks.

According to the collected data, the average £152 paid annually by the customers includes overdrafts, foreign exchange and transactions fees and other unspecified fees.

About 56% of the charges were due to overdrafts, both from planned and unplanned usage, while foreign exchange fees accounted for 11% and late transaction fees made up 6%.

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The remaining 27% were classified as ‘other’ that included monthly account fee, unspecified bank fees or bank subscriptions.

The new free Fee Fighter tool utilises TrueLayer, a secure FCA authorised service, to gain read-only access to a user’s bank account to process every description of the transactions and allocates it to a specified category.

When the banks hide fees in the description of the transaction, Plum extracts the fee from the description itself.

Plum CEO and co-founder Victor Trokoudes said: “For too long, banks have been guarding customer data, and have been purposely vague about the true cost of overdrafts, borrowing, and FX.

“But with Open Banking now a reality, people can see in real time what charges they are being asked to pay by the banks and therefore take control of their money to avoid paying them.

“Enabling people to take control is why we launched Plum and that’s why we’ve created Fee Fighter which, in less than five minutes, helps people find a better deal and avoid fees when it comes to banking.”